Posts: 14

I was thinking about really clever developments in games after wondering who invented the game camera. Haven't played many audios, but noticed the camera idea in STW and BK, but who first came up with it? It's so simple but clever.

Yeah, the tile camera, I wondered what the first instance of it was. I thought it was a brilliant idea on BK, but doing quests on STW made me realise that the camera itself enables the creation of environments that wouldn't be navigable without it, or at least you'd have to have something just as inventive.

I'm also wondering where some key standards first made their appearance, for example, slash to chat, arrows for menus and walking, etc.

And thus the beast grew powerful, and fire and thunder swept the land. But Mammon stirred in their hearts, and the beast Foundered, and its Corpse arose, and commanded "thou shalt not fly in my name." And the blazes shall freeze cold, and the souls of the followers of Mammon shall learn to tremble in the face of ice as they did before the fire.from The Book of Ice, 10:13

Hi.Well that's the way it's always been done for some reason. Arrows for menues, slash for chat, and those. The earliest examples of this kind of menu style are jim kitchen's games and gma games and also pcs games. Aprone changed this up with towers of war though. There is no reason developers can't do different menu styles, it just been that way for so long. I think the arrow keys for menues are supposed to mirror game console navigation, or old style computer navigation in games.

Guitarman.What has been created in the laws of nature holds true in the laws of magic as well. Where there is light, there is darkness, and where there is life, there is also death.Aerodyne: first of the wizard order

If the wheel fits, why reinvent it? ... ... ... The first place I remember the slash thing from is Castaways, but I'd be more surprised if it didn't come either from a common mainstream standard, or Aprone's past projects.And arrow keys are all but made for navigation, to the point where I was confused the first time I encountered a game that used something else. I don't even remember which that was... something for MSDOS or Windows3.1, no doubt. ... ...

True about arrow keys. Whenever a game uses other keys to move objects around, it throws me. Using arrows feels intuitive, yet using A, S, D, and W for the same job, doesn't. And yet it's exactly the same configuration of cuboid lumps of plastic. Weird!

I think the A-S-W-D configuration might have come from games like FPSs, which expect the player to use their right hand on the mouse. I dunno; MK4 was what got me stuck on it, and that was more or less a port of a 2-player arcade game.

Arrows have always been used the same way as DPads... that's nothing new. Modern mainstream pc games use the same setup at least for navigation. the first camera of the instance you are talking about that I am aware of was BK 3. Montazuma's revenge had something similar, but not to the same extent as BK 3... which I think was the first game where that was fully developed and more than something made halfway as an extra, it was designed to be an essential navigation aid. / for chat and ingame commands is probably connected somehow to entering commands in older operating systems like DOS and even to the command line still used. Possibly IRC as well.

I never played those two in enough detail to speak of them... just speaking based on the ones I have played. lol In any case, I don't think it matters who came up with the idea or who did it first. Maybe I should give Mario a go again...